Return to Witch Mountain

After the December episode of Twilight Rummage Sale, I came to terms with the deteriorated state of the basement's hygiene.  Here's an example of poor storage quality:  for months I had books stacked on an upended box containing a child's booster seat.  On top of the box, plastic wrapped bathroom tissue (a few of which had been taken upstairs to the hall closet).  On top of that, more books.  I had loads of other books in disarray piled on a table nearby.  My goods from the last Twilight sale were in the garage waiting to be sorted, including things I was keeping for myself.  Last night I brought my laptop downstairs, put on season 2 of Orange is the New Black, and got to work.  I sorted out most of the books into "keep", "Powells", and "swap meet" piles.  I fit the last roll of old carpet padding in the garbage can, so the collectors could get it this morning.  I found a small pile of stuff to bring upstairs and put away.  Before I knew it the old basement was starting to look like a safe haven again.

We've only just begun

White lace and promises

A kiss for luck and we're on our way

Selling books at Powells has been going really well...the last time I went I got a ride so I could take about three times as many books as I usually carry.  Which isn't saying much, but now there's a dent in the shelves where I had them before.  Sooo...many...books...there used to be three or four times more too.  Unbelievable.  When the weather gets dryer, I'll start lugging them over to the book buyers again.

The last Twilight sale was blessed with a great turnout and my usual excellent regular customers.  There's been talk of the Eagles Lodge being sold but that's not going to happen, at least not for a long time.  I am so relieved, I can't even tell you.

I just finished a book by Emma Brockes, She Left Me the Gun.  I was reading it in The Fresh Pot when a guy at the table next to me wanted to know what I was reading.  I held up the cover and said it was a biography.  Then the guy asks me if it's a romantic novel. I said no, it's nonfiction (hence the word biography).  It's about the author's mother and how she left South Africa to escape her horrifically abusive father, but I didn't want to get into that.  Then the guy says, "But it probably has some romantic stuff in it, huh?"  I don't like to ascribe sexism to someone's motives two sentences in, but it was complete nonsense coming out of him in any case.  It reminded me of the time that a guy at the Gap asked me about a book I was carrying, Cries Unheard: the Story of Mary Bell by Gitta Sereny.  I think no one really wants to know what you're reading, it's just an awkward way to open up a conversation.  There's nothing more awkward than bringing up Mary Bell at the Gap.

Credible and Competent Reviews

It's been a long time since I reviewed any organizing and housekeeping lit so I found a couple nice things for discussion.

Unfuck Your Habitat is a Tumblr blog I subscribe to that has lists of tips, admonishments, and "before and after" photo scenarios.  I live for "before and after" pics and they're probably what most make me want to get up and move stuff around.  On a daily basis the blog charges you to make your bed and "unfuck tomorrow morning" by preparing a few simple things ahead of schedule.  I give this blog A+ for simplicity and visuals; organizing suggestions should be concise. 

My habitat is still mildly fucked and I've got an ant problem that won't quit, but blogs like this one make me keep trying.  Here's a graph prepared by Fitzrovian Industries analyzing the sharp downward trend in problemosis over the last four years:

 I credit Johnny Ryan's book Prison Pit #1 for inspiring the high-end rating.  That's about as bad as it gets.

All right, my next review is about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a book by Marie Kondo, who is an organizing consultant from Japan.  I got my own copy at last, because there are about 700 holds on it at the library and one of my friends who is reading it needs a little more time with it.

This is a preliminary review because I need to finish reading it.  I'm going to rate it highly already because Ms. Kondo actually had a mystical experience that brought her to her current organizing philosophy.  A god-like voice spoke to her after she had a mini-breakdown and told her how to change her approach to paring down!!  Which happens to be focusing things you love to keep, or as she puts it, things that "spark joy", rather than on the stuff you get rid of.  I know that this concept has had a profound meaning for some people I know, and applied to other aspects of their lives.

My only disagreement with her so far is that she thinks you should do all the organizing of everything all at once, whereas I've been doing it space by space.  I think I'd wanna die if I I had made an occasion of doing my whole house, my stuff and Dylan's stuff together.  I can see why her method makes sense though.  I don't know if I want to apply it to my place at this point.  Also, if I finished then this blog is finished, right?

It's finally getting nicer outdoors in Portland and that means it's time to put free stuff out on the sidewalk.  It's time to get free stuff too, or leave it where it lies.  Free sidewalk stuff makes a total hypocrite out of me.

Basement library beatdown

I'm back in the basement again pruning the usual junk.  I'm going through the books Dylan had down there and picking out what I mean to keep.

I intend to give some more books to friends and have Powell's Books buy most of the rest.  Though I think I'd like the Portland Art Museum's  library to have some.  Dylan had the most amazing collection of comics by overseas creators all over the world.  I think it would be great to have them in a place where people who love art want to be.

I concede that it doesn't look great down here, but it's better than before.  And you can see the entire bookcases, as I removed the junk on the floor in front of it.

Remember this?

And this?

I'm glad I took pictures.  Otherwise I'd feel like nothing is really changing.

Going through the books this time is surprisingly similar, emotionally, to all the other sifting I did with Dylan's collections.  It's a little easier to reason with myself about where these will all end up, but I still experience some self-recrimination and sorrow.  Also, the mental and physical exhaustion of the process.  I need a foot rub after all this. 

Dig Dug

I felt a huge sense of accomplishment telling my sister that I'd turned a nearly unusable room into my new bedroom.  Somehow the incredulity of other people at the things I do makes me feel fantastic.  I just got back from California.  I haven't really had relatives in my house in about a year and a half, which is kind of funny since I've gone to see all of them.

Now that I'm back here I'm trying to get back to the basement thing and working on that part I had pictured here.  I spent about 20 minutes on it just now and here are some things I found:

• a green coated-wire rack or trellis of some sort, disassembled
• brass lampshade, seemingly for no lamp I own
• green wooden house from an old Monopoly game
• plastic storage drawers filled with actual keepsakes, as wells as rags and vintage hankies
• that fucking bag of papers I referred to in the blog post to which I just linked above.

Part of the reason I'm upset over them is that I'm afraid to look and see what a mess I might have made of Dylan's and my 2011 taxes.  So, they are still in that room being punished.  I can't bring myself to even handle them.

On a lighter note I'm starting to look through the keepsake bits and see what there is.

The days are getting longer, and the SAD stuff is waning, but I've had some mild persistent anxiety for a few days now.  I have a lot on my mind, more to come on that.  I loved being away but I'm glad I have so much to occupy me here.

I finished two books while I was away, The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett and A State of Heat by Sheilah Graham.  I didn't realize I was an Alan Bennett fan until I found this book, he wrote the play The History Boys and another great book that my mother-in-law gave me years ago, The Clothes They Stood Up In.  I wouldn't even have seen the book I just read except that it was on a counter in the library, in a display of small books that tend to get lost in the shelves.  It was standing next to a book illustrated by Tom Neely. 

Needles & Pins

I haven't done any book reviews in a while so I thought I'd write this up.  It's Tokyo: A Certain Style by Kyoichi Tsuzuki.  It's a very small (4.25" x 5.75") volume about the tiny apartments in which people in Tokyo live, really it's a photo book with lots of short paragraphs about the types of people that live in each space.  I'm very fortunate to have a apartment that's fairly big for a single dweller, but there's a lot of unusual things in this book that anyone can use if they need ideas for storing and stacking their possessions.  For folks with minimal square footage at their disposal, a lot of the subjects of this book are not what you'd call minimalists!

I got this when I worked at Reading Frenzy years ago, and you can still get it at Powells, but it looks like you have to order it.

This has been a strange week.  I've been feeling a little wistful over an event that is related to the big picture of what's happening with me.  Also for many days now I've been having some fucked-up dreams, I only remember about half of them and I'm not sure where they're all coming from.  I am getting up earlier in the morning than I used to though.

On another bright note, my job hunt is turning up more leads than ever.  Everything I do is for a better tomorrow.

Garage Sale Day

My mom and I had a garage sale at her house yesterday.  The whole thing was literally in the garage.  She had placed an at in the local paper and sure enough we had about ten or twelve people waiting outside when we raised the doors!  I wasn't expecting the onslaught.  When I have sales in my own driveway I have to sit there all day to sell anything.  My mom had a lot of vintage furniture, which seems to draw a lot of people.  I did sell the bear footstool, and a load of nice dishes that I had no use for at home.  I was gifted three sets of dishes last year all at once, and I already use two sets and have no room for more!  It's nice to see people excited about your stuff. 

My star customer was a guy, about 60 or so, who wanted to buy vinyl albums.  We had some, Jim Nabors and the Pointer Sisters et. al., but not what he was after.  He told me the records we had were "too liberal" for him, and that he wanted music from the 1950s.  I showed him a shoebox full of cassettes just in case.  He passed up Hank Williams Sr. and Patsy Cline but purchased Rage Against the Machine's Battle of Los Angeles.  ?!?!?!  Then he got a backpack shaped like a bat, hoping that one of his grandkids would like it.  That's a bat, like the small flying mammal, not a baseball bat.

I'm reading a book called Lies My Mother Never Told Me, by Kaylie Jones.  She's the daughter of James Jones, the author of books like The Thin Red Line and From Here to Eternity.  Kaylie has written several novels, including A Soldier's Daugher Never Cries, which is based on her childhood.  The book I'm reading is an actual memoir about both of her parents, their lives together and their alcoholism, which Kaylie inherited.  It's very good, but I think I would like to read some of James Jones' work for once.  I read some a book with some of his letters to friends, not his novels yet.

What was my mother doing with a Pointer Sisters album?

Helpful for you, maybe...

I have been glossing through some more reading on the my favorite subject, and it's still not the best use of my time.  Toss, Keep, Sell! by Leah Ingram was good for people who want to make money from things they don't need anymore.  I didn't really need it, because I've been using eBay and Craigslist for years to sell things I don't want.  These are good outlets for a lot of people to get a little extra cash, but it  bothers me that people are making a bundle telling other people that there might be gold hiding in their cupboards and cellars.  I've sold I don't know how many things over the years and I can tell you that it also takes a lot of time to do it.  Especially if you are learning how it's done.

The other book I had was The Complete Idiot's Guide to Decluttering by Regina Leeds.  I liked it a lot, I think it's a great guide for someone who doesn't know where to begin.  It's methodical and breaks the job down room by room, and then each room is categorized into smaller spaces.  It's a smallish book, unlike other Idiots' Guides I'm used to.  I'm embarrassed to be seen in public with this kind of book, you see, so it's nice to be able to conceal it.

I've also got a book from the Real Simple series of lifestyle books, all about cleaning different things in the home room by room.  Things like electronics, appliances, rugs, you name it.  This book also goes room by room.  Unfortunately I don't have the title or author info right now.

Drudge Report

I spent a big part of today shredding a pile of old checkbooks.  Also I'm figuring out what I need to keep from a big pile of computer books, boxes, wires, and random parts.  Salvation Army will be here next week to take away some furniture.  I can see more and more of the floor in my computer room!

I found at least two sketch/notebooks of Dylan's.  He used to draw in all kinds of random notebooks that he had handy, and keep story and interview information in them.  I am keeping them together to share with our friends if they want to see them.  I still keep a lot of random bits of paper that he wrote on, as well as other ephemera of his that doesn't have a specific category.  I've been saving these little things in a special file for over a year now.

I have to confess that I've been leaving the basement alone more and concentrating on the upstairs area, partly because it's so cold and wet out and I've got heat upstairs.  For an unfinished basement though, mine stays fairly dry and free of mildew.  Right now it's becoming a little more of a catch-all for things I find upstairs that need to leave the house soon.  I've hit a little bit of a wall in the basement too, because some of the furniture down there is just waiting to come upstairs when I make room for it.  Which is exactly what I'm doing.

I tried reading Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World, but it was really off the subject of what I meant to study.  I'm not even sure how I found it at the library.  I did learn how to slaughter a chicken humanely from this book, but it made me glad I'm getting more vegetarian.  There are so many pitfalls that I'd feel more sorry for the bird if I had to take it apart.  I'd end up making it inedible.

Fitzrovians' first book review

Today I'm reviewing Simpler Living : a back to basics guide to cleaning, furnishing, storing, decluttering, streamlining, organizing, and more by Jeff Davidson.  It's one of the books I took out of the library the other day to give me some hints and inspiration for my tidy-up procedures.

I'll start out by saying I don't consider myself a minimalist by any means.  I like stuff.  "Simpler" living is my goal, but I can't live the Shaker lifestyle.  And don't get me started on feng shui.  I think feng shui, according to the popular wisdom of modern interior design,  is like the unicorns I used to draw when I was in fifth grade.  Some of them had wings, some had rainbow horns, some had beards and some had tiny, dainty feet like ballerinas.  There is no one feng shui.  It has become a magical concept variously interpreted by contemporary weenies that was adapted from actual ancient lore.

That said, I think that Simpler Living isn't bad, but it's kind of overwhelming.  It has simplifying ideas for everything!!!!!  The title alone should be a hint that simplifying isn't so simple.  There are a massive amount of bullet points for every idea.  On a side note, I was also disturbed by the inclusion of a (non-captioned) photo of a basket of toys that included three teddy bears and two Gollywog dolls.  WTF?

I want to keep reading about this subject, for the same reasons as before.  I said once in a previous blog entry that this subject has become my version of porn. 

Post Vacation Slack

I'm getting back to my old pace before a week ago,  but it's been hard.  I've been recovering from losing my voice, which is still pretty bad.  I had a cold over a 1 1/2 weeks ago and I've been feeling fine but the voice started to go right before the holiday.  Last night after getting home my first order of business was to hurt my back so badly that I needed to lie down immediately, which also hurt.  It happened just as I was bending down to look into a storage box, so I barely had to do a thing to ruin myself.  My back hurt through most of today, so I decided to take it easy.

I did, however, do some critical cleaning work.  I'd been putting off cleaning off a shelving unit in my garage so I did that today.  None of the things on it were very heavy but I managed to get rid of a lot of stuff on it that had been collecting for a few months.  I still kept the box of bonsai supplies though.  Dylan and I started a bonsai hobby when we first moved in together in 1997 and we just held onto the rocks and fancy planter and other things.  I think I'll give it another go.  2013 will be my bonsai achievement year.

Finally heard from the college that's taking my donation of Dylan's books, they are coming Friday!  I am so glad that students will be learning from these books in a matter of weeks.  Speaking of which, there's already a wonderful collection that Caitlin McGurk is organizing at Ohio State University in Dylan's name.  Check out their blog about the Girl Scouts coming to visit and learn how to do their own comics!  I was a Scout once, I would have loved to have this kind of field trip.

I found this photo of me from my early years, cleanin' of course.  A Cinderella story, outta nowhere. 

La Vida Limpia

Thanky-doodle

It's Thanksgiving day and I'm waiting for my sister and her partner to come and get me so we can converge on other family members in a third location.  I wanted to check into my blog while I have a minute.

I only remembered a few days ago that I haven't really consulted any books about cleaning or organizing since I began this struggle.  I've looked at a few websites and recalled some common wisdom but haven't taken an academic approach to this thing yet.  I went to my library's website and put a couple books on hold to get started:

1. Leeds, Regina.  The Complete Idiot's Guide to Decluttering. 
2. Davidson, Jeff.  Simpler living : a back to basics guide to cleaning, furnishing, storing, decluttering, streamlining, organizing, and more. 

I already had 13 books on hold so I couldn't add any more after these two.

I don't think I'm going to learn a lot of surprises.  I really just want some inspiration.

Speaking of which, here's a show I really liked that I don't think is on anymore: How Clean Is Your House?  It originated in England, and then it became a program on American cable with the same two sassy ladies.  I know mine isn't even close to what they've seen, but right now it's in a state. 

 

Every day in every way...

...things are getting better and better, said John Lennon to Sean.  Here's a corner I worked on for about two hours this afternoon.  Does it show?

I had to crop it, you can see in the lower right a portion of a porno-graphic novel that I culled from the Bad Apple's stock.  Whoopsie!

You can see some of the great art I've got downstairs.  The piece in the yellow frame is a painting by my friend Sean Christensen A.B.T.  I made it a note on my to-do list to start finding frames for prints and think about moving my art around again. 

I'm reading one of the latest novels by Juliet Marillier, Shadowfell.  She usually does fantasy fiction that takes place in more or less a real time and place in history, but this seems to be pure fantasy.  I like it but it's more on the juvenile side of her genre.  I've read all of her writing so far and I have another of her new works on hold at the library, where it's getting processed as a new book.  I'm in it to win it.

Just because

I don't have a lot to say today.  I just wanted to drop in, mainly.  I've been feeling great these last couple days.  I think it has something to do with the beautiful fall weather we've been having.

I did a little sorting out of the laundry room, where I've been keeping a lot of movies.  How do you reattach a label from a dvd box when it's fallen off?  I seem to have a lot of those to fix.  I made a box of stuff to take to Free Geek.  I feel like I'm making custom gift baskets for celebrity award show swag every time I go downstairs.

I decided that it's in my best interests to give things away to charity than to make huge efforts to sell them, unless they seem like a sure thing.  My time is too valuable to plan the future life of every object I have.  I decided a long time ago that unless it's beautiful, or of real sentimental value, or very useful, then it doesn't need to take up space in my home.  Function over form and all that.  I can't hold onto everything waiting for the perfect time to have a garage sale.  My sanity is most important right now, not making five bucks in my driveway or putting every little tchotchke on eBay.

Did I mention that I'm making my bed every morning now?  For most of my life I rarely bothered, but I do it now right after I get up.  It's a nice habit that came out of my new quest for neatness.  I read a book about changing habits recently: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg.  It says that changes to one habit lead to other positive changes, and this is an example.  I'm also trying to keep my kitchen cleaner and my refrigerator stocked.  I also make a hot breakfast every morning.  By that I mean oatmeal and fruit.  Maybe the breakfast thing came before the bed making though.

What's behind the mask

Things have come a long way and I'm willing to give myself credit, but there's always another mountain to climb.  Here is a picture of that mountain.  The photos I had taken a few days ago concealed what's going on on the far wall of the room: all these books and magazines.  I think I'm going to get radical with this area.  I'm not going to reveal what I mean yet, but I promise I won't set any fires.

Someday, it would be nice to have a roommate.  I'm not ready for one, but even if I was he or she couldn't move in.  There's too much upstairs that might have to come down here, and there's not enough room still.

While cleaning tonight though, I cleaned up an item I found on the street a long time ago that should help me sort a few treasures:

It was filthy, but now it's on a shelf holding art supplies.  I came up with a new tip: If you can fit a container on a shelf that will hold things that you normally put in a unit that sits on the floor, go with the shelf thingy.  Freeing floor space will free your mind.  Every time I get something off the floor for good I feel ten times better.

I'm having another brainwave about having a garage sale or combining efforts with my mom in a couple weeks and bringing things up to Olympia to sell in her sale.  She has a better garage.  But, I would pay in time and gas traveling up to Oly, and I'd have to hold onto the things for longer.  Those Freakonomics guys should do a study on all the reasoning I am putting into where and when I disperse my possessions.

St. Crisp, or, I'm So Glad You Asked

Someone asked me today about the title of my blog and I never really thought to explain it before.  It started out as a different kind of blog, you see, and as I told my friend today I kept the name because I don't want anyone else to use it.

This is Quentin Crisp:

He wrote several books, among them was a memoir called The Naked Civil Servant.  It's about his life as an openly gay young man in London at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England.  The title of my blog is adapted from a line from this book.  Fitzrovia was a bohemian part of London, where notables like Virginia Woolf once lived, and where Quentin hobnobbed with his friends. 

Here's another photo of Quentin, a still from a great movie called Orlando (based on the novel by Ms. Woolf):

His career seemed to really take off in his old age, with writing and acting and spoken word performances galore.  He was working past his 90th birthday.  How amazing is that?

There were two movies made about him, and John Hurt played him in both, three decades apart: The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York.  You can borrow them both from the Multnomah County Library!

Eeeeek!!

I'm so thrilled, you can really see the floor in my new photos!  And those piles of boxes?  Disappearing as we speak, because I'm finally using them up.  I still have a conundrum about getting rid of some furniture, as well as a number of lamps that I don't yet have a use for.  They're kind of heirlooms though, I don't want to say goodbye yet.

So far my blog experiment has been an unqualified success.  I'm really following through on the cleanup downstairs and up, and seeing a big change.  There's a long way to go yet but I'm not down about it anymore. I have a different perspective on the manageability of my stuff and the process.

Having this blog to get people to witness this project has got me thinking about other ways I could use blogging to change some of the things I do, or to accomplish goals that I want to achieve.  I don't need an audience for every single thing, but having one in this case really worked.

Here's another view:

Now you can pay attention to the art on the walls instead of the forest of clutter that was there!  I know it's not perfect, but baby steps and all.

I've been reading a book called 9 Highland Road, by Michael Winerip.  My therapist recommended it to me, because I'm interested in reading about mental illnesses.  It's about a group living home for mentally ill folks who are trying to acclimate to life outside psychiatric hospitals.  The actual house is located in a small town on Long Island.  It's about some of the individuals that lived there, as well as their counselors and their experiences getting along in the community.  There's nothing like reading this to let me know that my problems are small.

Free Will vs. SAD

Thanks everybody who has been reading my silly blog, I really appreciate it.  Thanks also to my new followers.  I hope I'll have more soon, but then I forget to be an official follower of my friends' blogs so I don't really deserve it.

As much as I am loathe to I decided to dive into cataloging all the books I'm donating, I made a nice spreadsheet and it's going faster than I thought it would.  I've got to take pictures of all of them too, can you believe it?  I hope the tax man doesn't want photos someday of all the crap I gave to Goodwill this year, because I sure have a lot of receipts for it.  I am asserting my willpower over my urge to put off the book stuff, because after getting back from California last week I became acutely aware that my good spirits wouldn't last while I am procrastinating.  We've had driving rain for days, whereas when I left for the Bay Area and during my trip there'd been nothing but sunshine.  I'm trying to head off any feelings of depression this season.  I have some problems every winter, but this year I'm going to be aware of them before they happen and use some focus to work through them.  I really want to get my living room ready again to have friends over and it's hardly in that state now.

Here is a piece from a really good DVD zine from some creative folks in Canada, it's called the Winking Circle.  I found it at random at the library!

Watching stuff like this makes me feel a lot better about the world. 

In other news, two of my friends had to follow me down into the basement today so we could get to my garage & drive away.  They could see for themselves that I've been working hard! 

The Day After Xmas

The Salvation Army came yesterday to pick up a few things from my house, including that blond wood thing I mentioned in a previous post.  I moved all the donations to my garage for easy grabbing, and I had to put the blond unit on a "piano mover" trolley to get it about 10 feet from where it had been resting since August.  It was sooo heavy!  Just to get it on the trolley took imagination.  It's nice to see things go when they need to be out of the way, but when they're gone it's kind of like when a holiday happens and you want more afterwards.

Here's a pic of the basement room now that the donations are gone:

You can see there's been a lot of progress since day one of this blog.  You can see the floor.  It's hard to tell that there's a path beyond the towers of stuff, but it's there.

I should have taken a picture of the laundry room, where I kept a lot of the things I was thinking about giving to S.A.  I'd forgotten what the washing machine and dryer looked like.

The above photo doesn't show something I'd like to hide, but it needs to be seen:

It's in the same room, just out of view to the right.  Boxes I'm saving for the bookopalypse upstairs.

Ah, San Francisco

I'm attending a convention here in the Bay Area, and it happens to be in the Design District of San Francisco.  It's not an interior design convention, but the Alternative Press Expo or A.P.E.  I'm getting inspired by a lot of creativity here.  I'm lucky because I parked in an area where there are some great stores, such as Roche Bobois, a European furniture place.  These are some very high end shops!  My tastes aren't really expensive (as you can probably tell from the pictures you've seen so far) but I can appreciate good quality when I see it.

I'm looking for a really great bedspread I saw in a book called Paris Style vol. II, it was in the bedroom of Christian Louboutin.  I can't find a picture of it at all on the net, so here's a photo of a chair in his living room to give you an idea of his aesthetic.  He's the shoe designer, in case you don't know who I'm talking about.

The bedspread doesn't really look like this, but it's very bold and colorful and exotic.  I think I stand a chance of finding something to fit what I'm after here in the Bay Area, don't you think so?

My blog is growing up!

My blog has one "follower", that feels like a big deal.  Thanks follower!

Again I'm away from my nest, but I did a few cleanup things this week.  After big move I did about a month ago, where I closed an old office/store, I had a few pieces of merchandise that I took over to the new office.  Instant clean space! A couple square feet of it, anyway.  I thought I'd have time to sell more books and get them out of the way, so I put them in my car.  They are still in there, I didn't get the time.

I've had this half-baked idea for a garage sale in the next couple weeks, but I don't know if the weather will be inclement by then.  It's been an unusually pleasant, sunny autumn  for Portland, OR.  I heard that it rained in Olympia today so those days might be over for the next five months.

Many years ago, I had a job working for a woman who was a shut-in.  We'd clean her house, but she could only stand to do about a square foot a day most of the time.  She couldn't go out because she had environmental sensitivities, and she was allergic to dust from cleaning.  I keep thinking about her these days.  I'd have to wear a space helmet to do everything I'm doing.

As for the books I'm donating, my accountant tells me I need to take pictures of the books and write down titles, authors, market value, etc.  Do you remember how many there were in that photo?  Well, now there are more!  I hope this is all worth it.